On August 14, 2003, a major outage knocked out power across
the eastern United States and parts of Canada. Beginning at
4:10 p.m. ET, 21 power plants shut down in just three minutes.

Fifty million people were affected, including residents of New
York, Cleveland and Detroit, as well as Toronto and Ottawa,
Canada.

Although power companies were able to resume some service
in as little as two hours, power remained off in other places for
more than a day.

The outage stopped trains and elevators, and disrupted everything
from cellular telephone service to operations at hospitals to traffic
at airports. In New York City, it took more than two hours for
passengers to be evacuated from stalled subway trains.

In New York City alone, the estimated cost of the blackout was
more than $500 million.